Author: Michael Ashenafi, Mario Ramos Gallardo, Amy Herman, Sean M. Tanny 👨🔬
Affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Rochester 🌍
Purpose: Updates to the Varian Eclipse Treatment Planning System (TPS) have introduced new objects to replace pre-existing Clinical Protocols to aide clinicians in plan quality assessment. We have created a program for updating Clinical Protocol files and creating Clinical Goal templates to be compatible with the Eclipse v18 format.
Methods: Python code was developed to amend pre-existing clinical protocol templates to the updated syntax from version 15 to version 18. The code iterates through a directory of clinical protocol xml files that include dose constraints, structure templates, optimization priorities, and field information. Dose constraint priorities are added and set to 1, most important, for target volume, spinal cord, and brainstem structures. All other structures are set to priority 2 which is arbitrarily chosen. Variation acceptable and Primary clinical goal elements are added to each structure’s element tree, as required by the v18 syntax. A second file, clinical goals template, is created by extracting certain sections of the clinical protocol reference xml file. The clinical goals template can then be imported into the TPS for future use without having to create the template de novo.
Results: 574 clinical reference protocol xmls were updated such that they are compatible with Eclipse v18. Because priorities are now automatically assigned, the user no longer needs to manually sort the structures into priorities each time the template is used. Clinical goals templates were additionally created for every pre-existing clinical protocol.
Conclusion: With the Aria v18 upgrade came an unexpected change in the required elements for dose objective assessment, thereby requiring the user to manually update each protocol. By automating this, a considerable amount of time is saved. Because clinical goal templates were introduced in version 16, the conversion code also creates these goal templates, further reducing the time needed to create all new templates manually.